The Countercoup and the Trials After

Back in August, I wrote:

Historically, it is not the government or elected officials that have resisted the various attempts, some successful, some not, to turn the US government into an authoritarian aristocratic state; it is the people. Republicanism, in the original sense of the word, runs deep in the US public. The Vietnam war was not ended by the federal bureaucracy or Congress; it was a popular movement that ended it. The prosecutions Maddow describes in Ultra failed, but it was reported and the public voted out the Nazi collaborators in Congress. Union veterans were the strongest opponents of compromises with the racists of the South. And now the major opposition to Trump and the neo-fascist Republican Party is not elected officials or federal bureaucrats; it is a broad public coalition.

And after a world-shaking election, this turned out to be half-true. The public turned out, and dealt the fascists a stunning blow but, also, the Democratic Party leaders picked and supported many successful candidates who won. (And a few duds but, well, that happens.) The countercoup has started with a bang. I am impressed; I underestimated–most of the resistance underestimated–the Democratic leadership; I never dreamed they could pull this off. The first battle of the countercoup has been fought and won. So now what?

“Stop saying history will judge them. Judge them now. With judges.”—Joe Sandow, writing at the beginning of the Biden Administration

Huge crimes have been committed, are being committed. If a million are not yet dead because of Elon Musk’s foreign aid cuts, the number will soon reach a million, and that will be only the beginning. Under the direction of a hack Secretary of Defense, Venezuelan fishers are being murdered. The war in the Middle East continues, killing innocents, and sapping US military strength and morale. The health care funding cuts will come into effect as the new Democratic Congress comes to power, killing and disabling thousands of Americans.

As Radley Balko writes “What Congress can do without Trump’s approval is oversight.” Several Democratic committee heads are already planning hearings, but Congress has the ability to investigate, not the ability to try and convict. Will it be enough? The Department of Justice is run by a Trump administration loyalist. The oathbroken reactionary faction of the Supreme Court have shown themselves willing to treat President Trump as an absolute monarch, the so-called “unitary executive.” We still haven’t seen the second part of Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s insurrection, nor are we likely to.

The path to justice seems to run through expanding the Supreme Court and removing Donald Trump from the presidency, and these things are going to be hard to achieve, even assuming the Democratic leadership has the will. Perhaps also, a restriction of the Presidential pardon power would be needed, if that is possible. I’m impressed with how the Democrats conducted themselves in the election just past, but will this translate into convicting and punishing the malefactors of the Trump administration? We’ve fluffed this before. In fact, I don’t think there is an instance in US history in which high crimes (that is what these are) have been properly punished. Most of the Confederate traitors were pardoned. The Ultra prosecutions failed. The Vietnam war ended in defeat, after what we now know to be treason on the part of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and the hawks who made it went on to make hash of the victory in the Cold War, invaded Iraq, and have now lost a war with Iran.

I think we need to create a court to try the cases that have arisen from the Coup of 2025. (Most of the insurrectionists of 2021 have unfortunately been pardoned, leading to many secondary crimes.) Creating a new court to try the Coup leaders implies, first, Supreme Court reform, probably in the short term, Supreme Court expansion. It also implies prosecutors, and these obviously cannot come from the Trump administration Department of Justice.

So the work is only beginning. Let’s get started.